Apropos of Dolores

“The Adversary” is far from a bad hour of television, but it’s one of the weaker episodes of Westworld. We’re just past the halfway point of the season, which is when a show has to start focusing on its endgame, and in practice, this often means that we get an installment devoted to what showrunners call “laying pipe,” or setting up information that will pay off later on. There’s a lot of material being delivered to the viewer here, but it lacks some of the urgency of earlier installments, and on an emotional level, it’s more detached than usual. (The exception is gorgeous silent sequence that leans heavily on an orchestral version of Radiohead’s heartbreaking “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a musical crutch that I’ll forgive because it’s so effective.) For the most part, though, it puts advancing the mystery ahead of spending time with the characters, and when we look back at the season as a whole, I have a feeling it will turn out to have been structurally necessary. I like all the intrigue surrounding the maze, the acts of industrial espionage in the park, and the enigmatic figure of Arnold—which are beginning to look as if they’re just different aspects of the same thing. But it’s all fairly standard for a series like this, and it isn’t the reason I keep watching. Westworld has so much going on, both for good and for bad, that its mystery box aspects seem less like the main attraction than like a convenient spine. And it means that the show sometimes has to take care of a few practical matters to prepare for the big finish.

What surprised me the most about the episode, though, was the reason I found it a little less compelling than usual. It was the absence of Dolores. She’s obviously an important figure—she’s the show’s nominal lead, no less—and her journey is central to the overall arc of the season. If you’d asked me if she was my favorite character, though, I would have said that she wasn’t: I get more pleasure out of our time with Bernard. But if you take her out of an episode entirely, something interesting happens. Westworld, like Game of Thrones, is an ensemble series that spends much of its time checking in on various groups of characters, and it means that you often won’t see important players at all, or for no more than a minute or two. And it’s only in their absences that you start to figure out who is truly essential. When Bernard was offscreen for most of last week, except for a brief conversation with Elsie, I was aware that I missed him, but it didn’t detract from the rest of the story. With Dolores gone, it’s as if the engine of the show has been removed. It’s surprising, because her scenes with William and Logan haven’t exactly jumped off the screen, and her storyline is the one area where the show seems to be stalling, because it’s clearly saving her big moments for closer to the end. But Dolores’s gradual movement toward consciousness is such a crucial thread that removing it leaves the show feeling a bit like Game of Thrones at its worst: a collection of scenes without a center. We aren’t supposed to identify with Dolores, exactly, but she’s the most dynamic character in sight, and her evolution is what gives the series its narrative thrust.

This is why I’m wary of the popular fan theory, which has been exhaustively discussed online, that the show is taking place in different timelines. The gist of the argument, in case you haven’t heard it, is that the scenes involving Dolores, William, and Logan are flashbacks that are occurring more than thirty years before the rest of the show, and that William is really a younger version of the Man in Black. Its proponents bolster their case using details like the two different versions of the Westworld park logo, the changing typeface on a can of condensed milk, and the fact that we never see William or Logan interacting with any of the other human characters. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, but nothing that can’t be explained away in isolation as a deliberate mislead, and I don’t think the conspiracy theorists will give up until William and the Man in Black meet face to face. It’s a clever reading, and it isn’t inconsistent with what we know about the past tactics of creator Jonathan Nolan. For all I know, it may turn out to be true. It’s certainly a better surprise than most shows have managed. But I hope it isn’t what’s really happening here—and for many of the same reasons that I gave above. Dolores’s story is the heart of the series, and placing her scenes with William three decades earlier makes nonsense of the show’s central conceit: that Dolores is slowly edging her way toward greater self-awareness because she’s been growing all this time. The flashback theory implies that she was already experiencing flashes of deeper consciousness almost from the beginning, which requires us to throw out most of what we know about her so far.

This isn’t always a bad thing, and some of the most effective twists in the history of storytelling have forced the audience to radically revise what it thinks it knows about the protagonist. But I think it would be a mistake here. It has the advantage of turning William, who has been kind of a bore, into a vastly more interesting figure, but only at the cost of making Dolores considerably less interesting—a puppet of the plot, rather than a character who can drive the narrative forward in her own right. It’s possible that this may turn out to be a commentary on her lack of agency as a robot: the series might be fooling us into reading more into Dolores than we should, just like William does, which would be an inspired trick indeed. But Dolores is such a load-bearing character that I’m worried that the show would lose more than it gained by the reveal. Her story may be nothing but a bridge that can be blown to smithereens as soon as the other characters have crossed safely to the other side, as James Joyce memorably put it. But I’m skeptical. As “The Adversary” demonstrates, when you remove Dolores from the equation, you end up with a show that provides memorable moments but little in the way of an overarching shape. (The scene in which Maeve blackmails Felix and Sylvester into making her more intelligent only highlights how much more intriguing Dolores’s organic discovery of her true nature has been.) The multiple timeline theory, as described, would remove the Dolores we know from the story forever. It would be a fantastic twist. But I’m not sure the show could survive it.